Books, arts and culture

"Punk Rock"

TWO plays written by Simon Stephens, a British dramatist, have premiered in New York recently: the spectacular, showy “Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” opened on Broadway in October, and this week saw the off-Broadway opening of the leaner, rather fiercer “Punk Rock”. Where “Curious Incident” explored the very particular inner life of an unusual young person, “Punk Rock” shows the explosive reactions generated by a bunch of unusual young people colliding with one another. You might like to guess which production ends in confetti and which in gunfire.

Before the show opened, the listings in some local publications had been vague. "Punk Rock" had been described as dealing with the trials and tribulations of British high-school students in the lead-up to their exams, a description that could apply to anything from “The History Boys” to “Harry Potter”. The play's essence, though, emerges in a single shocking scene: a school shooting.

Johnson: Grammar versus meaning

JOHNSON recently sized up the controversy that pits It’s me against It is I. Both exist in English: the first is common in speech, the second is preferred in writing. But Nathan Heller, a writer with the New Yorker, insisted that only It is I is correct. He argued that the verb to be and its forms (am, are, is, was, were) equate a subject (it) and a predicate (I). Therefore they should be in the same nominative case, because it = I. It's me illegally breaks the equation, in Mr Heller's view, because it is nominative and me is in the accusative case.

Mr Heller’s confusion is a common one, and so is worth exploring again. The problem goes well beyond It’s me and has to do with grammar and semantics (that is, meaning). People think that grammar should line up neatly with meaning. Mr Heller thought that since It is I equates it and I (semantically they refer to the same thing), they must have the same grammatical form—namely the nominative case. But in English, as in every other language, grammar and meaning often part ways.

Q&A: Maggi Hambling

IN HER latest exhibition, “Walls of Water” at the National Gallery in London, Maggi Hambling explores the impact of waves crashing against the sea wall in Southwold, Suffolk, near where she lives. It's a subject, she says, that remains eternally captivating.

Ms Hambling, who has been painting and sculpting for over 50 years, is a leading figure in Britain’s artistic firmament. In 1980 she became the first ever artist in residence at the National Gallery. Since then, she has built a career based partly on controversy, creating works ranging from eerie portraits in oil to an enormous sculpture, "Scallop", now sited on Aldeburgh beach in Suffolk.

Matthew Thomas

TWO years ago Matthew Thomas was settling into his eighth year teaching at a high school in New York City. He had nearly finished writing a 640-page, loosely autobiographical, debut novel about an Irish-American family’s rise into the middle class in the face of the husband's crippling illness. But after a decade of work, Mr Thomas’s novel was still just a file on his hard drive and he had begun to fear that he might spend the next three decades as he’d spent most of the previous one: as an overworked teacher stealing a few hours from his marking labours to toil on his great work.

In the spring of 2013 he received the call that changed his life. The now-finished novel, "We Are Not Ourselves", had been bought by Simon & Schuster, an American publishing house, for more than a million dollars after a two-day bidding war. Rights to the novel have since been purchased by Fourth Estate in Britain and by Scott Rudin, an American film producer. “It’s a great relief, first of all,” says Mr Thomas of his vertiginous leap from literary obscurity. “The absence of fear and doubt and insecurity is profound. I notice that I don’t have a welling in my chest of anxiety, and to me that’s worth everything.”

Keith Haring retrospective

IT HAS been nearly two decades since the west coast of America saw a big Keith Haring exhibition, so the one at the de Young Museum in San Francisco is particularly welcome. Haring was a ground-breaking street artist inspired by social activism and progressive politics, as much as his identity as an openly gay man in the 1980s. He spent most of his short working life in New York, before he died from AIDS-related complications in 1990 at the age of 31. But San Francisco is an appropriate place for this new show as Haring had a special relationship with the Bay Area thanks to its politics and its embrace of sexual liberation. Several of his works are prominently displayed in San Francisco, including “Untitled (Three Dancing Figures)”, a sculpture in primary colours from 1989 that stands outside the Moscone Center convention complex. Haring might be rather fonder, however, of another exhibition site: the interfaith AIDS Chapel in Grace Cathedral where his altarpiece triptych, “The Life of Christ” (1990), greets those who duck in to light a candle.

"Behind the Beautiful Forevers"

“BEHIND the Beautiful Forevers”, an award-winning book by an American journalist, Katherine Boo, charts the real lives of several families living in Annawadi, Mumbai, a third-world slum in the shadow of a first-world airport. The narrative revolves around the Husains, a garbage-sorting family who are accused of burning their neighbour, Fatima, to death, and who are then financially crippled by both the justice system and the incipient economic crisis.

Ms Boo does a superb job of describing a society whose conditions of existence are almost impossible to convey to a Western readership. (The Economist reviewed the book here.) For the dramatist looking to adapt the story to the stage, the network of extraordinary relationships presents a huge challenge. Nevertheless Sir David Hare's profoundly touching new play rises to it. And this performance at the National Theatre in London, with a largely young Asian cast that includes the talented Shane Zaza, led brilliantly by Rufus Norris, the theatre's director-designate, is a slick work of epic proportions.

New film: "The Homesman"

TOMMY LEE JONES'S tremendous new film, “The Homesman”, is a boldly unusual western, in that the villain cannot be defeated in a gunfight at high noon. The villain, if there is one, is the land itself: the flat, dry, dusty terrain of Nebraska in the mid-1800s, where the winds are biting, disease is rife, and only a few farmers are stubborn enough to carve out an existence. This focus on the harsh landscape is one of the two aspects that make Mr Jones’s film so distinctive. The other is its focus on the women in that landscape. While it might be going too far to call “The Homesman” a feminist western, it comes as close as this historically macho genre ever has.

Despite the film’s ironic title, the lead character is in fact female. Running a farm singlehandedly, the industrious Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank) is brimming with optimism, but even she is battered by the loneliness of frontier life. It’s hardly credible that Cuddy—who has the straight teeth, clear skin and glossy hair of a 21st-century movie star—would be deemed as “plain as an old tin pail”, or that she wouldn’t be able to persuade anyone to marry her. On the other hand, her choice of potential partners is severely limited, given that the nearest town comprises half a dozen houses. Her desire for a husband is matched only by her desire for a musical instrument: touchingly, she makes do with a cloth with a piano keyboard embroidered on it.

Midge Ure and "Do they know it's Christmas?"

THREE decades before One Direction, Ellie Goulding and others added their voices and carefully mussed-up hair to “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”, Bob Geldof and Midge Ure (pictured together above) huddled in a London apartment to figure out what a couple of rock stars could do to help starving Ethiopians. Their directive was far-fetched. First, pen a song about the difficulties of life during an African drought. Then, gather famous British and Irish bands (plus four Americans, as it turned out) to sing on the charity record. Lastly, make sure it was a number-one hit.

Sri Lanka's civil war

The Seasons of Trouble: Life Amid the ruins of Sri Lanka’s Civil War. By Rohini Mohan. Verso Books; 368 pages; $26.95 and £16.99. Available from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk

Maya Arulpragasam is a British-born rapper of Sri Lankan heritage, better known as M.I.A. Her background is rather different from that of most people working in the music industry.Her father was heavily involved in the fight to defend the rights of the minority Tamil community in Sri Lanka, and M.I.A. spent her early life in the northern, Tamil-dominated part of Sri Lanka. During the 25-year civil war, which saw fighters struggling to create a Tamil homeland before final defeat in 2009, she returned to Britain with her mother and siblings.

New film: "The Imitation Game"

FOR a film about the man who arguably invented the computer, “The Imitation Game” feels appropriately, though disappointingly, robotic.

It shouldn’t. It ticks all the right boxes to seduce those who vote for awards: pretty, period detail, a thrilling wartime backdrop and an unlikely hero jailed under legislation that the modern West finds inhumane. It also features a stunning central performance from Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, the man who cracked Nazi codes at Bletchley Park in Britain, saving millions of lives, but who was later convicted of gross indecency for which he has since been officially pardoned. As Turing, Mr Cumberbatch is tortured but cavalier, brilliant but misunderstood. There is a subtleness to this portrayal that brings the man’s emotional detachment to the screen without the wallowing that might easily have accompanied it.

St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra

THE audience at the Royal Festival Hall last Saturday enjoyed a musical experience that is rather rare in London: Russian music performed by Russian players. It was delivered by the St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, which has returned to Britain with an all-Russian programme, assisted by a solo violinist, Maxim Vengerov, who is also from Russia.

Russian music is something of a speciality for the orchestra. It is the almost-exclusive focus of its recordings, and indeed on its last visit to Britain two years ago it only played Russian works. It is this specialising which makes the tours so highly anticipated. For European audiences, Russian music is what the Russians do best.

The Aga Khan Museum

THE low-slung, white-granite Aga Khan Museum in north-east Toronto shimmers through the autumn leaves. On first view the newly opened 17-acre site seems like an image out of a desert dream. It has a garden with five reflecting pools, as well as a dramatic, glass-domed prayer hall and a community centre for local Shia Ismaili Muslims. (The Aga Khan is spiritual leader and adviser to the world’s 20m Ismailis.) This 21st-century evocation of the Muslim East—an unexpected sight in a city that gets covered in snow for months each year—makes a fantastical introduction to a museum of Islamic arts.

The fourth Aga Khan, now 77, was a young prince when he entered Harvard University. “It was extraordinary,” he recalls. “That whole year in Humanities I, the Islamic world was totally absent, zero.” This is the first museum created by the global development network he later formed, and it sets out to illustrate the richness and diversity of Islamic cultures. The museum's central courtyard, which is open to the sky, has glass walls 13 metres (42.7 feet) high, etched with lattice patterns. When sunshine strikes the walls, the play of shadows is mesmerising.

Q&A: Paul Haggis

“CRASH”, a film about racism in Los Angeles written and directed by Paul Haggis, sparked controversy for beating the critics’ favourite, “Brokeback Mountain”, to the 2006 Oscar for best picture. Mr Haggis’s films have always divided opinion and his latest, “Third Person”, is no diferent, prompting varied reactions from the press. Powered by a stellar cast including Liam Neeson, Mila Kunis, Adrien Brody and Olivia Wilde, it deals with writing, love and trust.

Mr Haggis, who also wrote “Million Dollar Baby” and several Bond films, talks to The Economist about why he courts controversy, and the price of creativity.

Johnson: Speaking Navajo

DINÉENA bizaad doo shi? Do you speak Navajo? If not, good luck running for the Navajo presidency. Chris Deschene has learned this the hard way. Mr Deschene was in second place in the polls before he was booted from the ballot two weeks ago for refusing to take a Navajo proficiency test. The presidential election, which should have taken place on November 4th, was put on hold until the issue could be resolved. In defending this policy, Ben Shelley, the current Navajo president, waxed deep: “Diné bizaad is sacred. Navajo leaders should have both language and cultural fluency in order to be qualified. Every society has an obligation to hold on to their traditions.”

Navajo is the most widely spoken indigenous language in America, but its speakers are dwindling. Just over half of enrolled tribal members—around 170,000 people—are fluent. It’s little wonder that Navajo leaders are so sensitive about this language requirement. Navajo is one of the rare languages to have survived the onslaught of the English juggernaut that laid waste to North America’s native linguistic diversity. That the nation could even consider a strict language requirement for its president underscores the vigour of the language, but the continued popularity of Mr Deschene hints that many Navajos don’t see language as an indispensable carrier of their culture anymore.